Chapter 4

And here, one morning, Dr. Ferris, interested in spite of himself in her swift progress, found her, with a number of other young ladies and gentlemen, earnestly at work making, from different angles of vision, greenish clay statuettes of a handsome young Italian laborer who had upon his person no clothes whatever. That fastidious surgeon, to whom naked bodies, and indeed naked hearts, could have been nothing new, was shocked almost out of his wits. He had left only the good sense and the good manners not to make a scene. He beat instead a quiet, if substantial, retreat, and put off the hour of reckoning. His daughter was soiled in his eyes, and when she explained to him that a naked man was not a naked man to her, but a "stunning" assemblage of planes, angles, curves, lights, and shadows, he could not understand. And they quarrelled as furiously as it is possible for well-bred persons to quarrel. He commanded. She denied his right to command. He threatened. She denied his right first to create a life, and then to spoil it. He advanced the duty of children to parents, and she the duty of parents to children. Finally Barbara, thoroughly incensed at having her mind and her ambition held so cheap, flung out with: "Have you _never_ made a mistake of judgment?" And was astounded to see her father wither, you may say, and all in an instant show the first tremors she had ever seen in him of age and a life of immense strain and responsibility. From that moment the activity of his opposition waned. She knew that her will had conquered, and the knowledge distressed her so that she burst into tears.

"My dear," said her father, "I once made a very terrible mistake of judgment. There isn't a day of my life altogether free from remorse and regret. I have given you money and position. It isn't enough, it seems. My dear, take the benefit of the doubt into the bargain. If I am making another terrible mistake, you must bear at least a portion of the responsibility."

It is curious, or perhaps only natural, that Barbara was at the moment more interested to know what her father's great mistake of judgment had been than in the fact that her ambition had won his tolerance and consent, if not his approval and support. If she had asked him then and there, for he was still greatly moved, he might have told her, but reticence caught the question by the wings, and the moment passed.

And they resumed together their life of punctilious thoughtfulness and good manners. Dr. Ferris continued to cut up famous bodies for famous fees, while Barbara continued to do what she could to reproduce the bodies of more humble persons, for no reward greater than the voice of her teacher with his variously intonated; "Go to eet, Mees Barbara! go to eet."

VIII

It was a discouraged but resolute Barbara who stepped forth from her father's house that bright morning in May and passed rather than walked down the quiet upper stretches of Fifth Avenue. That she might fail in art, and make a mess of her life generally, sometimes occurred to her. And it was a thought which immeasurably distressed her. It would be too dreadful a humiliation to crawl back into the place which she had so confidently quitted for a better; to be pointed out as a distinguished amateur who had not succeeded as a professional; and to take up once more the rounds of dinners, dances, and sports which serve so well to keep the purposeless young and ignorant.

To society the tragedy of Barbara's back-sliding into art was very real. Dozens of men said very frankly that they missed her like the very devil. "There is nobody else," they said, "quite so straightforward, or quite so good-looking."

Hers was a face not less vivid than a light. It seemed that in her, the greatest artist of all, abandoning the accepted conventions of beauty, had created an original masterpiece. If she had been too thin, her eyes, tranquil, sea-blue, and shining, must have been too large. Her nose was Phidian Greek; her chin, but for an added youthful tenderness, was almost a replica of Madame Duse's; a long round throat carried nobly a gallant round head, upon which the hair was of three distinct colors. The brown in the Master's workshop had not, it seemed, held out; she had been finished with tones of amber and deep red. The brown was straight, the red waved, the amber rioted in curls and tendrils. Below this exquisite massing of line and color, against a low broad forehead, were set, crookedly, short narrow eyebrows of an intense black; her eyelashes were of the same divine inkiness, very warm and long; a mouth level to the world, resolute, at the corners a little smiling, was scarlet against a smooth field of golden-brown.

If she had a certain admiration of her own beauty it was the admiration of an artist for the beauty of a stranger. Since she had had neither hand nor say in her own making, the results were neither to her credit nor against it. For success in her chosen line she would have exchanged her beauty very willingly for a plain mask, her glorious youth for a sedate middle age. She would have given perhaps an eye, an ear, or so at least she thought in this ardent and generous period of early beginnings and insatiable ambition. In her thoughts nothing seemed to matter to her but art.

There was no sustaining pleasure in the fact that her father had given in to her. Opposition--unspoken, it is true, but not to be mistaken--remained in his attitude toward her. He found indirect means for conveying his idea and that of her friends that she was wasting herself upon a folly, and was destined, if she persisted in it, to only the most mediocre success. An exhibition of her works, undertaken with the avowed wish to know "just where she stood," had been discouraging in its results. The art critics either refused to take her seriously or expressed the opinion that there were already in the world too many sculptors of distinguished technique and no imagination whatsoever. Her friends told her that she was a "wonder." And there were little incidents of the farce which caused her to bite her lips in humiliation.

That the critics should be at the pains of telling her that she was without imagination angered her, since it was a fact already better known to herself. And in one moment she would determine at all costs to prove herself an imaginative artist, and in the next "to chuck the whole business." But she could not make up her mind whether it is worse for a captain to wait for actual defeat or, having perceived its inevitability, to surrender. To go down with colors flying appeals perhaps to noble sides of man; but it is a waste of ships, lives, and treasure.

Passing swiftly down the avenue, she did not know whether, upon arriving at her studio in McBurney Place, she should get into her working-apron or make an end, once and for all, of artistic pursuits. But with the lifting of the legless beggar's face to hers, all doubts vanished from her mind like smoke from a room when the windows and doors are opened. Whatever his face might have revealed to another, to her it was Satan's, newly fallen, and she read into it a whole wonder of sin, tragedy, desolation, and courage; and knew well that if she could reproduce what she seemed to see, the world would be grateful to her. She would give it a face which it would never make an end of discussing, which should be in sculpture what the face of Mona Lisa is in painting. It would be the face of a man whom one jury would hang upon the merest suspicion; for whom another would return a verdict of "not guilty" no matter what the nature of his proved crimes; and whether the face was beautiful or hideous would be a matter of dispute for the ages.

Upon arriving at No. 17 McBurney Place, and having climbed two flights of stairs, the door of her studio was opened before she could lay hand to the knob, and a very small boy with very big eyes, and no more flesh upon his bones than served to distinguish him from a living skeleton, appeared on the threshold, smiling, you may say, from head to foot. He was dressed in a blue suit with bobbed tails and a double row of bright brass buttons down the front, and when she had gathered him from the gutter in which he had reached to his present stunted stature, a child half gone in pneumonia, he had told her that his name, his whole name, was "Bubbles" and nothing but "Bubbles."

"Good morning, Miss Barbara," he said; "the plumber's bin and gone, and the feller from the hardware store has swore hell be around before noon to fix the new knobs in the doors."

"Good!" said Barbara. "Well done, Bubbles."

And she passed into the studio, wondering why a little face all knotting with smiles, affection, and the pleasure of commands lovingly received and well obeyed, should remind her of that other face, massive, sardonic, lost, satanic, which had looked up into hers across the battered tin cup on the top of a battered street-organ. She turned to a little clay head that she had made recently and for which Bubbles had sat; touched it here and there, stepped back from it, turned her own head to the left, to the right, and even, such was the concentration of her mood, showed between her red lips the tip of a still redder tongue. But no matter what she did to test and undo her first impression there persisted between the two faces a certain likeness, though in just what this resemblance consisted she was unable to say.

"Bubbles," she said, "you were telling me about beggars the other day and how much they make, and how rich some of them are. Did you ever run across one that sells shoe-laces, plays a hand-organ, and hasn't got any legs?"

"Sure," said he; "there's half a dozen in the city." And he named them. "Burbage: he's the real thing, got his legs took off by a cannon-ball in the wars. Prior: he ain't no 'count. Drunk and fell under a elevated train. He ain't saved nothing neither. He drinks _his_. Echmeyer: he's some Jew; worth every cent of fifty thousand dollars. They calls him congen_eye_tul, 'cause he was born with his legs lef off him. Fun Barnheim: he's German, went asleep in the shade of a steam-roller, and never woke up till his legs was rolled out flat as a pair of pants that's just bin ironed. Then o' course there's Blizzard."

Barbara was smiling. "What became of his _legs_, Bubbles?"

"God knows," returned the boy. "Blizzard don't boast about it like the others. But he ain't no common beggar. He's a man."

"A good man?"

"Good? He ain't got a kinder thought in his block than settin' fire to houses and killin' people. But when he says 'step,' _it_ steps."

"It?"

"The East Side, Miss Barbara. He's the whole show."

"What does he look like?"

The boy at first thought in vain for a simile, and then, having found one to his liking, emitted with great earnestness that the beggar, Blizzard, looked exactly like "the wrath of God." Whatever the boy's simile may convey to the reader, to Barbara, fresh from seeing the man himself, it had a wonderful aptness.

"That's my man," she exclaimed. "Blizzard! He's got a wonderful face, Bubbles, and you said just what it looks like. I'm going to make a bust of him."

"He's coming here?"

"Yes. Why not?"

The boy was troubled. "Miss Barbara," he said earnestly, "I wouldn't go for to touch that man with a ten-foot pole."

"I shan't touch him, except with compasses to take measurements. He's civil-spoken enough."

"He's bad," said Bubbles, "bad. And when I say bad, I mean millions of things that you never heard tell of, and never will. If he comes in here--and, and raises hell, don't blame _me_."

Barbara laughed. "He will come here, and sit perfectly still," she said, "until he wishes he was dead. And then he will receive money, and an invitation to come to-morrow. And then he will go away."

Bubbles looked unnaturally solemn and dejected.

"Besides," said Barbara, "I have you to protect me."

Though Bubbles made no boast, a world of resolution swept into his great eyes, and you knew by the simultaneous rising toward his chin of all the buttons upon the front of his jacket that he had drawn the long breath of courage, and stiffened the articulations of his spine.

Barbara's studio was a large, high-ceilinged room, whose north wall was almost entirely composed of glass. It was singularly bare of those hangings, lanterns, antique cabinets, carved chairs, scraps of brocade, brass candle-sticks six or seven, feet high, samovars, pewter porringers, spinning-wheels, etc., etc., upon which so many artists appear to depend for comfort and inspiration. Nor were there any notable collections of dust, or fragments of meals, or dirty plates. There was neither a Winged Victory, a Venus de Milo, nor a Hermes after Praxiteles. And except for the bust of Bubbles there was no example of Barbara's own work by which to fish for stray compliments from the casual visitor. Of the amenities the studio had but a thick carpet, an open fireplace, and a pair of plain but easy chairs. Upon a strong tremorless table placed near the one great window, a huge lump of clay, swathed in damp cloths, alone served to denote the occupant's avocation.

Off the studio, however, Barbara had a pleasantly furnished room in which she might loaf, make tea, or serve a meal, and this in turn was separated from the tiny room in which Bubbles slept, by a small but practical kitchen.

Barbara having withdrawn to roll up her sleeves and put on her work-apron, the legless beggar arrived in silence at the outer door of the studio, and having drawn a long breath, knocked, and Bubbles, not without an uncomfortable fluttering of the heart, pulled it open. The boy and the beggar, being about the same height, looked each other in the face with level eyes.

"_So_," said Blizzard, "this is what has become of you. You were reported dead."

"No, sir," said Bubbles, "I wasn't dead, only sick. She brought me here, and had her own father and a nurse to take care of me. And now I'm Buttons." And he went on glibly: "Come right in; Miss Ferris is expecting you. I guess she wants you to sit on the platform over in the window."

Blizzard, having unslung his hand-organ and slid it with a show of petulance into a corner, crossed the room, swinging strongly and easily between his crutches, like a fine piece of machinery, climbed upon the model's platform, and seated himself in the plain deal chair which already occupied it. From this point of vantage he turned and looked down at the boy.

"So," he said, "her father _is_ Dr. Ferris."

"He's _the_ Dr. Ferris," Bubbles returned loyally.

"So--so--so," said the legless one slowly, and he closed his eyes for a moment as if he was tired. Then, opening them, and in abrupt tones: "Pay you well?"

"Yes, sir."

"Many people come here?"

Bubbles, who had gone to school--not in the schools, but in the city of New York itself--could lie without the least tremor or change of feature, and with remarkable suddenness. "Lots and lots of 'em," he said. "_She's_ well known."

Blizzard merely grunted. "Tell her I've come."

But it was not necessary for Bubbles to give the message at the door of the inner room, since at that moment Barbara entered, her round arms bare to the elbow and her street dress completely hidden by a sort of blue gingham overall. Bubbles, whose presence was not required during working hours, at once withdrew to his bedroom.

Here he changed his tunic of brass buttons for a plain gray jacket, snatched his cap from its hook, gained the street by a back stair, and set off at the tireless street-boy trot that eats up the blocks. Half an hour later he returned, his face no longer wearing a look of anxiety, changed back into his many-buttoned jacket of dependence, and sitting upon his bed, his back against the pillows, proceeded with astonishing deftness and precision to figure with the stump of a pencil, upon the leaves of a small dog-eared note-book. Then, appearing to have achieved a satisfactory solution of whatever problem he had had occasion to attack, he began to go through a series of restless fidgetings, which ended with a sigh of relief and a guilty look, and producing from a hiding-place a cigarette, he smoked it out of the window, so that his room might not carry forward the faintest trace of its telltale odor.

IX

When Barbara at length told the legless man that he might rest, he appeared to think that she had invited him to converse. He leaned back as far as he could in the deal chair. His expression was no longer that which had struck Barbara so hard in the imagination, but one of easy and alert affability. He looked at her when he spoke, or when she spoke, but casually and without offence. Whatever feelings surged in him were for the moment carefully controlled and put aside. In his manner was neither obtrusiveness nor servility, only a kind of well-schooled ease and directness. In short, he behaved and spoke like a gentleman.

"You're the first person I ever sat for," he said, "who hasn't asked me how I lost my legs."

Barbara, regarding the rough blocking of his head which she had made, smiled amiably. That first impression of him, still vivid and lucid in her mind, appeared already, almost of its own accord, to have registered itself in the lump of clay. And she could not but feel that she had laid the groundwork of a masterpiece. If the beggar wished to converse, she would converse--anything to keep him in the mood for returning to pose as often as she should have need of him. And so, though entirely absorbed by the face which she had found, and at the moment almost uncharitably indifferent to the legs which he had lost, she raised her eyes to him, still smiling, and said:

"It wasn't from want of interest, I assure you. I'm sorry you lost them, and I should like to know how it happened."

"Bravely spoken," said the beggar.

"I have been told," said Barbara, "that you are a great power in the East Side, a sort of overlord."

"Even a beggar has flatterers. They overrate me." The accompanying shrug of his great shoulders had an affectation of humility. "Now, if I had a pair of legs--but I haven't. And if I had I shouldn't be an East-Sider. For the maimed, the crippled, the diseased, it is pleasantest to be in residence on the East Side. You have company. You may forget your own misfortunes in contemplating the greater misfortunes of others."

"Do you mind telling me," she asked, "where you learned your English?"

"My father," Blizzard explained, "was rather a distinguished man--Massachusetts Institute of Technology man, University of Berlin, degree from Harvard and Oxford. He had a prim way of putting things. I suppose I caught it."

The usual whine about better days was missing from the beggar's voice. If he seemed a little proud of his high beginnings, he did not seem in the least perturbed by the contemplation of his fallen estate. Barbara was by now frankly interested, and proceeded with characteristic directness to ask questions.

"Is your father living?"

"No. But it would hardly matter. We became thoroughly incompatible after my accident. He had very high ambitions for me, and a chronic disgust for anything abnormal--such as little boys who had had their legs snipped off. I didn't like it either. I suspect it made an unusually vicious child of me, a wicked, vengeful child."

Blizzard's candid expression implied that he had, however, soon seen the evil of his youthful ways, and turned over a whole volume of new leaves.

"What happened?" Barbara asked.

Blizzard laughed. "I cannot be said to have run away," he answered, "but I got away as best I could, and stayed away. My father settled money upon me. And that was the end of our relations."

"And then," said Barbara, "you, being young and foolish, lost your money."

"Oh, no!" he exclaimed. "I was a very bad little boy, but much too ambitious to be foolish. And you know you can't get very far in this world without money."

"Still," said Barbara, "a hand-organ and a tin cup?"

"A loiterer in the streets of New York," the beggar explained, "picks up knowledge not to be had in any other way. Knowledge is power."

"Then you don't have to beg, don't have to pose, don't have to do anything you don't want to do?"

"Oh, yes, I do. I have to crawl while others walk. I have to wait and procrastinate, where another might rush in and dare."

Again that first expression of Satan fallen overpowered the casual ease and even levity of his face. But he shifted his eyes lest Barbara see into them and be frightened by that which smouldered in their stony depths.

Without a word, Barbara stepped eagerly forward to the rough model that she had made of his head, and once more attacked her inspiration with eager hands. The beggar held himself motionless like a thing of stone, only his eyes roved a little, drinking in, you may say, that white loveliness which was Barbara at such moments as her own eyes were upon her work, and turning swiftly away when she lifted them in scrutiny of him. Now and then she made measurements of him with a pair of compasses. At such times it seemed to him that her nearness was more than his unschooled passions could bear with any appearance of apathy. Though a child of the nineteenth century, he had been enabled for many years to give way, almost whenever he pleased, to the instincts of primitive man, which, except for the greater frequency of their occurrence, differ in no essential way from the instincts of wild beasts.

Had she been a girl of the East Side he would not have hesitated upon the present occasion or in the present surroundings. But she was a girl of wealth and high position. It was not enough that his hands could stifle an outcry, or that the policeman upon the nearest beat was more in his own employ than in that of the city. Cold reason showed him that in the present case impunity was for once doubtful.

Her hands dropped from their work to her sides.

"How goes it?" asked the beggar.

"If it goes as it's gone," she said--"if it only does!"

"It _will_," said the beggar, and there was a strong vibration of faith and encouragement in his voice. "May I look?"

"Of course."

He came down from the platform, and she could not but admire the almost superhuman facility with which he moved upon his crutches. Halting at ease, before the beginning which she had made, he remained for a long time silent. Then, turning to her, he freed his right hand from the cross-piece of his crutch, and lifted it to his forehead in a sort of salute.

"Master!" he said.

The blood in Barbara's veins tingled with pleasure. He had thrown into his strong, rich voice an added wealth of sincerity, and she knew, or thought she knew, that at last the work of her hands had moved another, who, whatever else he might have been, was by his own showing no fool, but a man having in him much that was extraordinary. And she felt a sudden friendliness for the legless beggar.

His eyes still upon the clay--knowing, considering, measuring, appraising eyes--he said shortly and with decision: "We must go on with this."

"To-morrow--could you come to-morrow at the same time?"

"I _will_," he said.

"Good. Are you hungry?"

But the legless man did not appear to have heard her. A sound in the adjoining room had arrested his attention. He listened to it critically and then smiled.

"A good workman," he said, "is turning a screw into wood."

"How clever of you," said Barbara. "There was a man coming from Schlemmer's to put on some glass knobs for me. Bubbles has brought him in by the back stairs."

The faint crunching sound of the screw going into the wood ceased. There was a knock on the door.

"Come in," said Barbara.

Bubbles appeared in the opening. "We're all through in here."